I Do Like Romance

Recently, I’ve been listening to a Youtuber who calls himself “Diversity & Comics,” or D&C. From the side of a road or in a parking lot, he would review comics, usually Marvel. If the comic was good, he would praise it; if bad, he would denounce it all through the review and either rip it up or toss it out of his window. He has a particular hatred for the recent SJW trends in Marvel since they not only result in bad stories, they cause comic book shops — some of them having lasted decades — to close down due to low sales, hurting the comic industry as a whole.

Recently, however, he did a video on the removal of romance from Marvel superhero comics, and it made me realize something: I do like romance after all. I thought I didn’t like it, but I actually do.

I’ve written about the SJW attitude toward gender before, but the above video shows why it’s so rotten: it denies any possibility of romance.

Look at the language feminists often use to describe male sexuality: Objectification. Toxic masculinity. The male gaze. Madonna-whore complex. Look at the recent trend toward desexualizing female characters in Western-produced video games, mostly out of embarrassment over sexualized designs in the past; current Lara Croft is a great example. Look at how virtually every female character in modern action-adventure movies is either a bratty snark machine or a cold, unfeeling ice queen (Suicide Squad bucked this trend and was attacked by the critics for it, though that movie had far deeper problems.)

A male hero is never allowed to do anything as basic as earn the girl’s love through heroism. Today’s creative elites are embarrassed by the very notion of male-female romance, blasting it with insulting nonsense words.

For counterpoints, look at Holger and Alianora in Three Hearts and Three Lions. Look at John Carter and Dejah Thoris. Look at Cyclops and Jean Grey from the 1990s X-Men cartoon. Hell, look at freakin’ Ninja Gaiden III on the NES:

This kind of thing is what cultural elites are calling a disease. To them, this is a political crime, for it violates the precept that men and women are interchangeable, a precept that, though false, they hold onto dearly. Why do you think they denigrate romantic interests in these types of stories? Everyone should be motivated by purely bland, bloodless things. Romance, in their mind, should be reduced to the mechanical act of sexual intercourse and nothing more. Anything else is “oppression.”

Let me tell you something: when I was a kid, Misty’s Song was my favorite track on the Pokémon 2.B.A. Master album. My favorite part of Gundam Wing wasn’t the giant robot fights, it was the relationship between Heero and Relena, as well as the ones between Milliardo and Noin, and between Treize and Lady Une. I adored the harem antics of Tenchi Muyo as much as I did the high-energy action of Dragonball Z.

That stuff isn’t “sexist” or “objectifying” or whatever made-up terms SJWs use to declare basic human emotions to be horrible injustices. It has life and color, blood and sinew, energy and verve. No one is wrong for liking this, and no one is wrong for rejecting the sexless mechanoids the SJWs want our fictional heroines to be.

12 Responses to I Do Like Romance

Thank you for writing this. This has been on my mind a lot lately, and I have been disturbed by this interchangeability mindset in a lot of films and tv. A constant swarm of “badass strong female characters” doesn’t help either. It’s a farce and I believe leads to even more ruin in both stories and society.

I believe the term “toxic masculinity” is just swear words by feminist who don’t actually have an argument to stand on. Same as “male gaze.” Men have always been visual and we always will be. This modern day feminism is trying to go against nature in its social programming. It will only lead to heartbreak.

It really sickens me that people are trying to kill romance. Romance is one of the major motivators of characters and the backbone of entire plots. It reaches through time and space, it breaks the barriers of language, race and culture. A story with romance will grip the hearts and minds of most people on Earth.

Romance is human and the human spirit is one of triumph. If Marvel wants romance to go away, fine. Others will create new stories containing romance and succeed, while Marvel eventually withers away and dies, alone and unloved.

I am not saying that every single story absolutely must have romance. It is one tool in the author’s toolkit, a versatile tool that can be used in many ways. Only a poor craftsman throws away a perfectly good tool. More and more, I am beginning to suspect a lot of people in popular media are poor craftsmen.

I realized that myself when I really started writing. I actually LIKED the interplay between the sexes. I enjoyed seeing men being men and women being women and meshing well together and learning what made each other tick. I could pretend to just like dudes blowing stuff up, but there was more to it than that.

It also helped me learn to write different sorts of characters better. To know how they tick, and what they like, is part of writing in the first place. Without romance that’s a big piece of characterization missing.

Great post, Rawle. Don’t forget Conan and Belit, though Belit was — to use the technical term — a crazy bitch. A sort of “What if Tarzan had gone for La of Opar?” situation. It would’ve been nice to see more of the Conan-Zenobia interaction. Zenobia was a hell of a woman.